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Science Week Talk: Hottest ever since the Big Bang

What happens to the matter when it is so hot that even atomic nuclei melt?What happens to the matter when the density is so high that a spoonful may weigh as much as the whole of human population?

Just after the Big Bang, the Universe was indeed so hot and dense that ordinary atomic nuclei could not form. The matter could exist only in its most elemental form - quarks and gluons.

Since the year 2000, the world's two most powerful colliders, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (the LHC, since 2010) have been colliding heavy nuclei to create and study this primordial matter. By now, we have accumulated an ample amount of evidence that we have indeed created this long-sought after Quark Gluon Plasma.

In this talk, I will summarize what was expected, what is seen (with many surprises) and where we are going in this exciting new era of discovery.

Speaker

Dr. Sangyong Jeon- BSc from Seoul National University in Korea- PhD from University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.- Postdoctoral fellowship trainings from University of Minnesota and Lawrence Berkeley Lab.- Professor in the Department of Physics at McGill University since 2001.

Teachers are strongly encouraged to bring their students to this presentation.